Shelley, the A.I. Author

This story makes me a little nervous. Scientists have created an AI (Artificial Intelligence) that writes Horror stories. Why would they go and do something like that? As a writer who predominantly writes Horror stories, I’m feeling a little like that guy with the rivet gun at the auto assembly plant who gets replaced by a robot. Has technology made guys like me obsolete? You decide.

This is the opening line from a story fragment written by Shelley: “The doctors said that he had been bound to another hospital for some time after the doctor had called him a nurse. He had to restrain himself from the pain and the fact that he was determined to be injured for a month.”

Huh?

If I was to read that and I didn’t know it was written by a program, I’d say it was the work of an amateur, a beginner. Or a child. Which, I suppose, Shelley is. Will Shelley evolve, get better? I kinda hope not. There’s too much competition in the literary world as it is. They’ve created a program that can tell stories, but can it be POETICAL? Can it make the words SING? Not now, it can’t.

You can follow Shelley on Twitter, if you want to, and even help it craft crappy stories. Play along for the novelty if you wish, but really, folks, you don’t need an AI to write lousy Horror stories. Trust me on that one. I’ve seen reams of it, dating back to a time long before anyone had ever even thought of AI.